Dennis Brown of the Chatham Kent GRS in the SW of Ontario posted this note on another forum.
'The Chatham Kent Garden Railway Society is located in southwestern Ontario and has a membership that extends from Windsor to London, Ont. The club has a free online newsletter located at www.swogscale.com. Article ideas are contributed by members. There are some garden railroaders located in this corner of Ontario but this is the first time that a semi-formal club has been established.
In response to his introductory post live-steaming, I sent him THIS - ‘Counterpoint’ that he has been kind enuff to publish in the pages of the website.
BTW - Anybody who has pix of live-steam operations - please send them to Dennis for inclusion in the website pages…TIA.
Here’s MY take on starting up - of necessity a VERY cut-short article…
'Many people in our great hobby have taken the step further, or even backwards [!] and moved over to the fascinating area of live steam propulsion in their garden railway. That’s right, using the original method of driving the wheels around by generating real steam, using a gas or alcohol-fired burner, or even real coal to boil the water that makes the steam to drive the wheels.
How real is that?
Of course, opening this subject will generate a whole new world to most folks, used to turning a knob or pressing a button to make their little train do as they want it to – live steam can be a little daunting in that respect, with the need to pay close attention ALL the time. So let me get one thing straight before we move on -
With any live-steamer YOU are the engineer and conductor and maintenance crew all rolled into one, and if this is going to be too much of a chore for you, or you have problems in concentrating on the task in hand, then live-steam may not be for you.
AS with any other hobby, you can start small – highly recommended – and either stay small, or move on up in complexity. Believe me, this is the way to get going – it’s no use spending a whole pile of hard-earned $$$ only to find that it’s just too much trouble. The up-side of this is that you can often get a bargain loco this way - bought by some poor sap who spent a pile only to find that what he really wanted was just to see a train with smoke that made real train noises – pretty easy these days with swish electronics.
There must be a gazillion questions going on in your mind right now – how do I get started in live steam? How do I set up my track? What the heck is actually out there? Can I run a logging operation? Are these little locos really that controllable? Are they expensive? Are they [gulp] safe?
Well, it has to be said that there are two kinds of folks who move to live steam. The first are those who have already built a railway of some kind, and want to progress to a more realistic ‘steam’ loco look, sound and smell, and those who are outright beginners at garden railways, with no set preconceptions about the work and effort required to get the whole shebang working.
My first recommendation is to find a garden railway group or club locally that has members who run live steam – that way you’ll get to pick brains and get valid opinions from the get-go. Nothing beats running live steam except talking about it.
You’ll also benefit from getting hold of a few back-numbers of the Kalmbach magazine – ‘Garden Railway – it might even have one of the many articles in it from our famous Ontarian live steam guru, Jeff Young, whose compact and fascinating little line is based on British outline locos of small dimensions and easy handling. In fact, it was the Brits who started all this business of narrow-gauge live steam in the backyard, back in the late 1960’s and their famous loco builder, Roundhouse Engineering, has a world-renowned reputation for right out-of-the-box reliability.
Next, decide on what type of railway modelling appeals to you most, and it’s here, folks, comes crunch-time. Remember I said that starting small was a good plan? Well, the AccuCraft ‘Ruby’ a little generic-style 0-4-0 tank loco, is a great starter loco even better if you build it from a kit, and will set you back around $500 or so. There are a scad of after-market bits to dress it up, even to convert it to a tender loco or even a Forney, and it is limited only by your imagination. And then, it goes on up – AccuCraft are probably the most well-known name in US/Can live steam on our side of the water, and they make a couple of great logging locos – Shays – and are about to produce the Climax, too.
Add the range of cars of all kinds, you-build-ems or store-bought, and you will have your logging operation – these little locos will pull a HUGE load because of their low prototype gearing. You want radio control? It’s not difficult, and you can control the direction and throttle – even a whistle - by the use of modern 2.4GH radio control. These locos run on safe butane/propane mix, obtainable just about anywhere’ although it has to be admitted that our Canadian winter is not conducive to running gas-fired locos for technical reasons. Costs are commensurate with the complexity of the model, added to the fact that although they are built in a factory, they are HAND-built, but still bargains, in my opinion, nevertheless. A two-cylinder Shay will set you back about $1200 – and $1500 for the ultra-smoooooth three-cylinder version.
Safety can be an issue, IF you let it. They run on high-pressure steam - which HOT, and are fired by burning gas, which is HOT and the loco can get HOT, so yes, precautions are necessary to ensure that nobody who is not occupied with the actual running has their paws safely in their pockets and leaves alone. Not for nothing are we known as the ‘burnt-finger brigade’.
If you already have a ground-level track, then you’ll find out the hard way that only the geared logging-style locos can cope with a grade that would have your ‘sparkie’ loco sniff in disdain, after all, you just need to crank up the volts and ohms to get it up that hill, right? Well, in order to do the same with your steamie, you’d need to be around four inches tall…so radio control is a good plan there.
Ah, you’ll say, I’ve seen steam railways in the backyard on elevated tracks, with full-length passenger trains or long drags of freight steaming around at waist height…
Yups, that’s right, and these are mostly in the scale of 1/32, or Gauge 1, and here you are moving into the need to handle big models with ease and safety, rather than bust your spine reaching down on the ground. My Beyer-Garratt weighs in at around 18kg’ ready to run, and if you think I’m going to grovel on my hands and knees to futz around with THAT at ground level, then please thing again.
Hey, what’s this about Gauge 1? …and narrow gauge? Wojja mean? There are different scales of this stuff? And gauges, too? Heck, I’m confused!!!
All the more reason to join in a club or group and get unconfungled. Do you want to run narrow gauge? East Broad Top or Denver and Rio Grande? Darjeeling and Himalaya? Welsh? German? It’s ALL there to enjoy. Standard gauge? US or Canadian, German, British or what have you? Well, that’s there too. Little locos? Yup. BIIIIG locos – even a [gulp] Royal Hudson? Yup, that’s there too, with our own Alan Wright here in Ontario building the whole range of Grove smooth-siders to go behind it.
Dribble………
What will all this cost me? I hear the plaintive cry… Well, let me put it this way – was your first car a Rolls-Royce? Prolly not. Was it a reliable pretty basic family-type sensible car? Prolly was. It’s no use saying you can’t spend many thousands, by the time you’ve ended up with what you want. So start easy, d’ye hear?
So it’s the same with live steam. Smaller is most often cheaper, but bigger is a whole new ball-game…so my advice can be broken down into the following points –
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Join a club where you can meet up with people who have done it.
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Get ahold of a few back-numbers of ‘Garden Rail’ or ‘Steam in the Garden’ or the British ‘Garden Rail’ – the first and the last are available online, BTW.
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Start easy and pay attention to what you are doing – it’s not a good plan to hold an open day with pets running around the kids who are also running around and whose parents are running around chasing them all.
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Join in one of the website fora – the two best English language sites in North America [and by implication the world] are - www.mylargescale.com and www.largescalecentral.com - the UK has the newly opened but already very popular www.gscalecentral.co.uk with many of us from over here posting on it, too.
Any queries about this article can be sent to Dennis on his address posted on the home page, or to me, over here in UK but a proud member of the Ottawa Valley Garden Railway Society – www.ovgrs.org - my email is tadecfoley[at]aol.com - call me tac – I’ve never met anybody who can pronounce the real thing!
Happy Steaming!
tac
www.ovgrs.org’
